Saturday, May 18, 2013

Movie Review: Upstream Color

Back in 2004, a young man named
Shane Carruth created Primer, a
groundbreaking science fiction film that dealt with a storage unit and time
travel.The film was made for an
unbelievable $7000, a thousandth the budget of most science fiction films
made in Hollywood and it was a thousand times smarter, more complicated and well-staged
than most science fiction films made in Hollywood. It wowed genre fans and
quickly became a cult classic. Carruth’s followers waited patiently for his follow
up ‘A Topiary’, and were devastated when that project fell through. The man
went off radar, slipped away into oblivion and it seemed like he’d disappeared
for good. It’s been nine years since Primer,
Carruth is back, with a sci fi story that is even more complex, engrossing,
innovative and thought provoking than his previous effort. And just like his
first film, Upstream Color crushes
the mainstream competition from Hollywood.

There have been plenty of movies
where the filmmaker explores the post Old Monk questions of man’s free will and the
musty feeling of a higher power controlling humans. Carruth makes the question
‘Are we who we think we are’ outdated by introducing an imaginative query: What
if a man and a woman are drawn together because they were entangled in the life
cycle of an ageless organism? Wrapping your head around that plot immediately
becomes a challenge as Carruth starts spinning your head right from the opening
scene, inviting us to invest our grey cells into the oblique imagery on screen. This is
neither a film that you can sit back and consume with a bucket of popcorn, nor
is it a film that you can figure out by constantly hitting rewind. This is an intricate stream of arthouse storytelling that can be understood and appreciated only if you’re willing
to go with the flow, rather than hitting pause and looking for hidden meaning
and coherence in the frames.

The whole film is an array of mostly
dialogue less scenes with electronic music montages, Carruth is clearly
derivative of Terrence Malick’s work, where you’re required to breathe in and
experience the film. Making sense of Primer
was arduous given the insanely technical dialogue driven nature of the
film, Upstream Color is just as
labyrinthine but is more pleasurable to decode thanks to Carruth’s technical
proficiency and his ability to make the narrative foggy without obfuscating the
story or meandering into self-indulgence. There is no poetic voiceover or shots
of foliage, Carruth is able to convey some insightful philosophy on why
humans long for togetherness by sticking with his characters. The bizarre imagery, elliptical narrative and
overall weirdness may turn off less patient viewers who would call it needlessly
complicated, but there was no other visual or aural way Carruth could communicate
the film’s ideology about love and inseparability across to the viewer. The
genius of the film is in fact the way Carruth shrouds the relatively simple
plot with an aesthetic layer that makes it seem like it is more byzantine than
it actually is. Like a magic trick, Carruth cleverly shifts our attention by
making us look at things that he wants us to see, the trick is to be able to
embrace the convolution on screen rather than try to fight it.

Most importantly, Carruth doesn’t
bombard the viewer with lectures on transcendence, spirituality and the human
condition – the themes are all there, but are coated around the science fiction
mystery thriller that the film ultimately is. There are no conventional Hollywood
style cheap thrills but the astounding sound design, the soundtrack, the
cinematography, the editing (all done by Carruth) exudes a higher order of filmmaking. Take Upstream Color as a
thriller and you get terrorists, a conspiracy, a serial killer and bizarre
insects. Take it as a love story and it’s a beautiful analogy of two people
drawn together because they can relate to each other’s emotional scars. Take it
as a looking glass that allows you to peer into the glorious depths of Shane
Carruth’s mind, and hope that it doesn’t take him nine more years to make his
next film.